eiaoa

If you're going to comment on an inflammatory topic like this, do so with respect for the opposing point of view. If you can't muster any such respect, and only want to smite enemies

So you're saying we should respect the views like:

1. the members of particular ethnicity and religion are terrorists, and

2. that mass-imprisonment of innocent members of an ethnicity is the correct response to the fear of terrorism from them?

Because those are some of the views expressed in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18565634

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18565128

Tolerance and respect of such views is shameful.

Has anyone had any issue with "Sold By X, Fulfilled By Amazon"? That usually works well for me.

That's actually the worst, since that opens you up to getting counterfeit items from reputable sellers, due to Amazon's inventory commingling.

Or, a government could just say...

Why not both? I'm serious. It seems like a good idea to promote competition and put a ceiling on the prices of essential medicines based on the global market. 10% above the lowest price may be a bit aggressive, but something must be done to stop these 10,000% markups we're seeing now.

Please don't Godwin already-flameprone threads. That's trolling, whether you intended to or not.

If you weren't aware: Godwin has repealed "Godwin's law":

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/12/14/...:

If you’re thoughtful about it and show some real awareness of history, go ahead and refer to Hitler or Nazis when you talk about Trump. Or any other politician.

Or any other regime.

My comment was not hyperbolic, as WWII is pretty much the perfect real-world example of the political ramifications of scientific and technological advancement. Far from "benefit[ing] all of mankind even if the benefits are initially felt closer to where they're conducted," if the Nazi's had invented the atom bomb before the allies, mankind would have suffered more than it has.

Exactly my point. Science wasn't neutral in WWII, and it's not neutral now. If von Braun hadn't been part of their regime, they may not have had V-weapons. If Hitler hadn't been such an anti-Semite, Jewish scientists may not have fled Europe en masse and instead helped the Nazi's develop the atom bomb.

Back then, if people celebrated and supported Nazi science in the name of an idealistic concept of politically-neutral human scientific advancement, Europe and maybe even America may be subjugated under a Nazi flag.

Everyone who cares about liberal political institutions should hope that authoritarian regimes are scientifically and technologically backwards, and work to keep it that way.

Do you equate the Chinese to nazis?

No, I emphatically do not. That's the most false and inflammatory misreading of my comment possible. The Chinese people are not villains, full stop.

The point I was making is that political regimes matter when it comes to the desire for progress in science and technology, and the idea that it doesn't is naive. I'm glad the Nazis and the Soviets were technically and scientifically behind the Allies and the West, and I think the world would be better off they had stayed even further behind -- even if that meant that humanity as a whole has its scientific and technical progress retarded for the want of their contributions.

Only one of those links was about Muslims. One was about the terrible conditions in labor camps that even Han Chinese are sent to, and another was about the jailing of human rights and defense lawyers for doing their jobs.

I don't care what nationality advances science, but I do want unabashedly authoritarian regimes to be at a technical and scientific disadvantage to ones that at least pay lip service to human rights.

They are harbingers of the computing apocalypse and have shown that progress is a lie. By 2050 we'll be forced to use monitors with the aspect ratio of swords, because the manufactures are going to need to find another ratio to senselessly maximize after they've achieved peak thinness.

This is fantastic news. Science will eventually benefit all of mankind even if the benefits are initially felt closer to where they're conducted.

I welcome increased science funding regardless of who is doing it

Would you say the same about Nazi science? The world depicted in the Man in the High Castle has some very impressive scientific achievements.

The idea that science and knowledge are an unalloyed good to humanity no matter who develops the expertise is a fairy tale. Scientific knowledge and the technical skill that flows from it are weapons. Weapons are tools that can be used for good or ill, so we want them to be in the hands of those who can be (more) trusted to use them for good and out of the hands of those who can be less trusted.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/prison-camps-in-china-th...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/china-is-creating-co...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/25/magazine/the-lonely-crusa...

My main problem with 16:9 is how obscenely long they are. I use my monitors to do work, not watch movies, so I have a lot more need for vertical real-estate.

Tilting them on their side doesn't help, because they're far too narrow that way.

Maybe engaging China is the first step to them opening up their society? Similar to the arguments against the Cuban embargo.

No. Them "engaging China" will not open up Chinese society, because Google will have to implement the exact same censorship regime that all the other Chinese sites do.

The Chinese government doesn't give a shit about Google's prestige in the West. They'll kick it out the second it gives them a little lip or is non-compliant with their demands. Google has zero power to change anything for the better.

Also, China has discredited the idea that capitalist engagement will cause liberalization. They've shown that an autocratic regime can have its capitalist cake and eat it too.

This needs "(2014)" added to the title.

This appears to be a repost of the famous Facebook study that manipulated people's news feeds: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...

You realize that automated credit scores are a thing in the US right? China is taking the concept a step further, but it's not unique to them

That's a disingenuous and misleading comparison. Your American credit score isn't going to drop if you criticize the president on twitter, or do investigative journalism that makes a government official look bad.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/chinese-blacklist...

That’s the gp’s point I think, the U.K. doesn’t have the the same separation of powers between government branches as the US. With some minor exceptions, Parliament is the whole enchilada.

An example of this is that, until recently, their "supreme court" was a committee in one of the houses of parliament:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lords_of_Appeal_in_Ordinary

Not all social media bots are malicious. And not all social media bots are posting content from low credibility sources.

The collateral damage from banning them all may be worth it, if they're a major means for pushing low credibility content and disinformation.

I'm trying to manufacture a theory that better fits all the facts. Intimidation is a simple theory, and acceptable as a fallback, but if that's all that was going on, then it raises some questions.

You definitely seem like you're trying to manufacture a theory, but nothing you've written "better fits all the facts."

At best, I think you're operating under a set of faulty assumptions that's causing you to mistakenly reject most likely explanation.

Wouldn't that be like a new zealander visiting the LA and doing something the Bloods don't like, and so the bloods barge into his hotel room on the night before he returns to new zealand and says "hey is anybody else here"? Like, what's the intimidation? He's about to be beyond their reach, and they didn't even say anything explicitly.

If it's intimidation, it's both lame, ham handed, and ineffective.

The intimidation is that they've shown interest in her and that they can get to her. It appears that she may have been a Chinese citizen (her account is translated), and Chinese people who annoy government officials in China may eventually be disappear into prison.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/25/magazine/the-lonely-crusa...

It seems more like they were looking for a specific person, instead of trying to intimidate directly.

That idea doesn't make any sense. They didn't search other rooms, and this person was a journalist that was covering a story that's more than likely embarrassing to one of their superiors.

It seems like they wanted to threaten and intimidate her in a deniable way. Their excuse was flimsy by design.

Plenty of countries get around this with independent but government funded media

Yeah, that's kinda what I was getting at. I don't recall the conversation advancing in that direction very often.

The only problem I've ever had with the ABC is that it's crap at local news.

I honestly think local news is the main problem. I'm not super pessimistic about the NYT, the WSJ, or the Washington Post. They have the prestige and the reach to attract lots of subscribers and/or patrons, and they're big enough to invest heavily in technology. It's the small local and regional papers that worry me. The staff per eyeball to cover all their beats is probably a lot less favorable, and they don't have much prestige to draw on to attract other support.

Soviets tended to play up the bad points in their propaganda, so it would likely be pushing images and videos of people suffering with AIDS

Soviets tended to play up the bad points in their propaganda, so it would likely be pushing images and videos of people suffering with AIDS, captioned with "American pigs aren't researching or treating this mass epidemic ripping through their capitalist stronghold".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Infektion

News organisations like the music industry before them need to realize that a huge part of what people used to pay them for was the reliable distribution of their product. This and the markup on it was where they made their profits and now its gone.

A viable, independent media is vital to a well-functioning democracy. I just realized that the implication decision behind of all this talk (about how the new media need to find a viable business model) is that our system of government shouldn't stand unless some of its vital organs are profitable in a dog-eat-dog capitalist system. Capitalism is given a higher priority than democracy.

I seriously don't think they care if we use Baidu or not. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the party would PREFER that we NOT use Baidu.

If the world used Baidu, it would be a propaganda coup for the CCP. They'd have the ability to disappear information they want to suppress (like criticism of the camps in Xinjiang), and freely push propaganda and disinformation (a la https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Infektion).

Think about it: if the web existing in the 1980s and the Soviets controlled the world's main search engine, the top results for "AIDS" would be disinformation articles about how the US government created it.

So, I'm sure the CCP would like the world to use Baidu, but it might not be high on their list of priorities to push right now.

Advertising is different from Javascript. Advertising can simply be a load of images that are easy to render, as in traditional periodicals. Web pages suck because it's easier for a site to instruct the client to download and run analytics software from 3rd parties, instead of doing that work server side.

My understanding is that one thing that Google, Facebook, and the internet as a whole have done is to make online advertising an incredibly high-volume, low-margin business. Trackerless banner ads pay almost nothing. Trackers push the margins up, but Google and Facebook suck up most of the air in that room.

Yes, I use aggregators so I don't fall victim (as easily) to echochambers of my own design. All sources are biased, but at least you can hopefully get some idea of the truth by reading differently biased sources.

I'm not sure if that makes sense as a strategy. By relying on aggregators (that aren't human curated like Apple News), you're just getting the sources that do the best SEO. If your aggregator does algorithmic curation, they'll build an echo chamber for you.

I think if you want to avoid falling into an echo chamber, it's best to identify a couple of high-quality news sources with different perspectives, and read them unselectively. Say two national newspapers with different political orientations, an international newspaper, and a local newspaper.

Local and major news sites alike, are cesspoools of intrusive advertising and tracking. They’re so poorly built, with so much advertising, that they hardly even function any longer.

But that's an effect, though maybe one that will create a vicious cycle. It's not the cause. The revenue rug was pulled out from under local news websites, and they're struggling to keep the lights on. Advertising and tracking are how everyone says you need to make money on the internet nowadays, and they're just following the example set by Google, Facebook, et al.

Focusing too much local news site's advertising and tracking practices is missing the elephant in the room.

If local news is left to die, there will be little to no media oversight or local government. What happens in state legislatures is important, etc. If you require all these small organizations to have two competencies, you're going to get a lot more government corruption.

There are plenty of holes to poke in his arguments, so have at it.

1. You're not going to truly release the social value of a monopoly unless you socialize it, either through social control or regulation. Without that, the monopoly will mainly serve to benefit its owners.

2. Monopoly R&D expenditure will likely be less than the excess profit captured by the monopoly's owners, and mainly motivated by potential regulation. IIRC, the main raison d'être for Bell Labs to exist as it did was to convince regulators to not break up AT&T. Without that threat it would have likely been more focused on AT&T's profit motive and less on generalized scientific advancement.

3. Monopolies (socialized or otherwise) will more likely end in stagnation.

In a world where users desire a "long tail" of brands, corporations continue to consolidate but simply invest in a wider variety of brand names and marketing for them. There's still synergy to be gained from a consolidated entity operating all of those brands. And so we're right back where we started.

Exactly. An example: Whirlpool owns many major appliance brands (e.g. Maytag and Amana). They can afford to make ever crappier products, because they know when a customer is unsatisfied, they'll more than likely buy another Whirlpool under a different brand name.

https://recraigslist.com/2015/10/they-used-to-last-50-years/

I don't think it's hard to explain: it's the cities' equivalent to cartelization. It's no wonder why two competing firms would like to prevent each other from lowering prices, and they often lobby for laws to do that. The mechanism here is the same.

A city or a state isn't a "firm." It's not seeking the private profit of its owners: it's seeking the welfare of its citizens, which is part of seeking the welfare of all the citizens of a nation. When it comes to government, "cartelization" isn't a bad thing, because it keeps private interests from exploiting public divisions to harm the common good for private gain.

Cartels prevent "races to the bottom," but some of those are actually good for society (e.g. the race to the lowest price per unit of product-value). Other races to the bottom are bad for society (e.g. lowest standard of living per worker), and government cohesion can help prevent them by resisting the private interests that benefit.

> but I'm confused about what part of what they did was actually illegal? Didn't just gullible people on GoFundMe fall for a fake sap story?

Yes, but there are laws that make various forms of such behavior criminal, such as fraud and criminal deception.

It's kinda depressing that some people seem to think the law ends (or even worse, should end) at caveat emptor.

Someone that does not want to be tracked by facial or gait recognition, either because he's a criminal or a political activist, will always be able to do that. There might be a race between the recognition software and the circumvention technology, but a dedicated individual will always be able to avoid that.

One issue is disseminating the knowledge needed to defeat such systems. I'm sure the CIA and KGB have manuals and training programs to teach those skills [1], but I'm not sure if the information is publicly available in a readily accessible form (e.g. not spread in small pieces among 100 books).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JASUsVY5YJ8